July 17, 2017

"The feeling was that they [the emails] must exist somewhere," [a former Trump aide said], "because once something is digital, it's never truly gone."... "There was never a thought of who might have them," the aide said. "Nobody at the campaign was trying to find them."...

Would it have been appropriate for the Trump campaign to try to find the emails?... What if an intelligence operative from a friendly country got them and offered them? And what about an unfriendly country? Would there be a scale, from standard oppo research on one end to treason on the other, depending on how the emails were acquired?

York asked "three veteran Republican operatives." You should go read all that. I'll just quote what was said by Barry Bennett ("who ran Ben Carson's 2016 campaign and also served briefly as an adviser to the Trump effort)":

"If someone I didn't know reached out and said, 'I have them,' I would have immediately called the [Trump campaign] committee and said this person says he has them... I wouldn't want to touch them. But I would very much want them out there in the public. It is still hard for me to believe that copies of them aren't out there somewhere... Even during the Carson campaign I didn't meet with anyone I didn't know... How do you know you're not being set up? I had people come to me and say they had dirt on [Ted] Cruz. I passed. Information can only be as trusted as the source that gives it to you. You can get easily burned with bad info or even looking like you want dirt. This is why everyone outsources research. No one in their right mind would want to touch documents under subpoena. No lawyer would ever let you. All of this being said, of course you want them to go public.... If the Russians had them, the last thing they would do is call a goofy record promoter in England and set up a meeting with a lawyer that can't even get a visa. Instead, DHL them from Asia to the New York Times."

ADDED: I'm rereading Bennett's last sentence. Bennett seems to be saying Don Jr. was a fool: 1. For getting personally involved in acquiring the material, and 2. If he thought the Russian government would hand over material in this manner. #2 also supports the inference that the Russian government wasn't behind the Don Jr. meeting. It wouldn't operate like that. But that also could mean that Don Jr. didn't think he was dealing with the Russian government and that he simply didn't think too much about what he was doing. He was a neophyte.

By the way, Hillary Clinton tried to pass off her destruction of the email as some sort of rookie mistake. I don't think anyone believed that. But, as York says (at the link), Donald Trump was effective just talking about how bad she was — having an insecure system, destroying the email while it was under congressional subpoena, and lying about it.

Eberwein was a former Haitian government official who was expected to expose the extent of Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice next week.

He has been found dead in Miami at the age of 50.

The circumstances surrounding Eberwein’s death are also nothing less than unpalatable. According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head.“ Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide” by the government. But not long before his death, he acknowledged that his life was in danger because he was outspoken on the criminal activities of the Clinton Foundation.

Eberwein was a fierce critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in the Caribbean island, where he served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years. “The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year.

Still waiting for the quote from the statute that can identify the crime. Any damage done is political. Which is exactly why the media reports never mention crimes.

OT. The JOEKA affair is something the media is hiding from public view also. Why is that? You would think a 'life time republican' with such name recognition changing parties would at least get a mention every half hour.

JayDee: She also was trusted enough by the Obama administration to join in on briefs to Congress. There is no logical reason anyone meeting with her should have assumed that, in a few months, the very same people who employed her and used her would be trying to convince everyone it was totes obvious she's a Russian spy.

“If the Russians had them, the last thing they would do is call a goofy record promoter in England and set up a meeting with a lawyer that can't even get a visa. Instead, DHL them from Asia to the New York Times.”

Masha Gessen, before we knew more: “More likely, Trump Jr. has told a kind of truth: Veselnitskaya had nothing of the sort that she had promised. The whole email exchange had been a con aimed at getting Trump’s top people to take a meeting with a Russian lobbyist. What makes it shocking is that the con worked, quickly and easily, because the conmen and their marks live in a shared world that runs on greed and the thirst for power—and nothing else.”

AA: I’m rereading Bennett's last sentence. Bennett seems to be saying Don Jr. was a fool: 1. For getting personally involved in acquiring the material, and 2. If he thought the Russian government would hand over material in this manner. #2 also supports the inference that the Russian government wasn't behind the Don Jr. meeting. It wouldn't operate like that. But that also could mean that Don Jr. didn't think he was dealing with the Russian government and that he simply didn't think too much about what he was doing. He was a neophyte.

Fool and/or, privilege. Trump Jr has such a high level of privilege, he’s not used to being questioned or thinking his emails are not secure.

“Once you’ve said “I’m in,” it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended…

“…This defense is pathetic for two reasons. First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it.

What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?”

It would be one thing for a foreign government to have in it's possession emails acquired from an official government server and another thing for a foreign government to possess emails from some kind of bootleg, homegrown, private citizen hardware setup.

Political malpractice, even gross political malpractice, is not a crime. Manafort and Don Jr are not employees of the Administration, so they can't resign. Don Jr could apologize to his dad and the GOP for taking a stupid meeting, I guess. But that's really about it.

When you're in a campaign against a candidate who's primary skills are destruction of evidence and silencing witnesses, I'm sure it does feel like something of a treasure hunt or an episode of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego.

"All of this being said, of course you want them to go public.... If the Russians had them, the last thing they would do is call a goofy record promoter in England and set up a meeting with a lawyer that can't even get a visa. Instead, DHL them from Asia to the New York Times."

This is a little ambiguous - who would be doing the DHLing, the Russians or the republican? - but what I find interesting is that a republican campaign manager thinks the place for the emails is the New York Times. That would produce the standard NYT 3 paragraph Nothing To See In Missing Emails except Yoga Classes. "Cover the news - with a pillow, until it expires." In its way Bennett's response is perfect - establishment Repubs still automatically, reflexively kiss the ass of the NTY, and Repub voters automatically discount everything they print.

Think about this for a minute. Crooked Hillary was Sec of State for 4 years, which is a little less than 1500 days. That would work out to roughly 20 personal and 20 business emails a day. The former is barely plausible if she were working half as hard as they claimed. And really, ditto the latter for the opposite reasons. When I was in a large law firm, I got upwards of 100 work related emails a day, with a handful of personal ones on that account. Looking at the level of detail in the ones we did see, I would have expected a micro-manager like Clinton to receive closer to my 100 a day, than the 20 she claimed. Sure, that is one of the reasons that she had Huma around, but still - how do you keep track of the foreign policy for the US in 20 emails a day? And for someone who supposedly worked as hard as she claimed to have done, is it really plausible that she truly had hours a day to respond to those 20 personal emails about her daughter's wedding, etc? And none of them touched on Clinton Foundation/slush fund business?

Of course, we very likely know how they did determine what was supposedly work related, and what was not - apparently they ran a list of keywords against her emails, and if the emails didn't have one of the keywords, it was considered personal.

As for crimes - we have rehashed the Espionage Act and Records Act violations ad naseum here. But there was also probably Obstruction of Justice in the intentional wiping of the server and destruction of handheld devices - some of which apparently occurred AFTER being requested by Congress. Clearly after being requested by the FBI earlier.

”…Who in that room do you think is above lying about what transpired there? Paul Manafort? Forget his deep Russian connections. The guy was a lobbyist for Mobutu Seske Seko. When he worked for the Pakistani intelligence service, he pretended to be a CNN reporter for a propaganda documentary he was making for them. The only way you could say “that man’s word is oak” is if Jell-O came out with a new oak-flavored pudding. (“Now with real bark!”)

“ Jared? The guy who initially “forgot” that meeting happened at all?“ Don Jr.? We already know he’s capable of lying about the meeting because he’s already lied about the meeting.

“ Oh, maybe you’re taking the word of the sketchy Russian lawyer. That’s a great idea. It’s also kind of hilarious. Many of the people pushing back on this story are doing so by questioning Natalia Veselnitskaya’s credibility. But we should take her word that nothing happened? Cults of personality are a helluva drug…

“…Which brings me to point No. 3. It doesn’t frick’n matter if — note the “if” — nothing came of the meeting. Junior can’t claim he, Manafort, and Kushner never sought to collude with the Russian government when he admits that he, Manafort, and Kushner eagerly took a meeting for the express purpose of colluding with Russia. This is like one of those episodes of Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” where some sleazebag is catfished into having a “date” with a 13-year-old girl only to show up and find Chris Hansen waiting in the kitchen with a transcript of their conversations. At least those scumbags had the “integrity” to lie and say it was all a misunderstanding and that they were just there because they really like hanging out and watching MTV and eating ice cream. “We had a lot in common! I thought we could be friends!”

“ I don’t recall any of them saying, “Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong because I didn’t actually get a chance to rape her.”

“ If you break into a bank, you can’t claim you did nothing wrong if the safe turns out to be empty any more than a terrorist can plead innocence if his bomb didn’t go off…”

Hillary Clinton could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any of her apologists. In fact, if Hillary Clinton did shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue I wouldn't be the least surprised.

As soon as they lost the election, Hillary, Podesta, et al started talking about collusion with the Russians. "What collusion? What are you talking about specifically?" everybody asked. Finally some specifics, this story is leaked by we don't know who.Did the top people at Hillary's campaign know about this meeting since before the election? Was the Obama Administration or our national security apparatus communicating with or leaking to her campaign? If so, that seems like a bigger scandal to me.

Don Jr broke no laws, he is a private citizen he has no obligation to report Russian contacts. Actually, only government employees with security clearances must report. None of these people were in government at the time.

Trump's son-in-law when getting his security clearance listed his Russian contacts, but stipulated the list was not complete and would be amended. That is why he hired lawyers to search his records to find missing contacts. The lawyers found this one and added it to the official forms.

Are these documents public ? If not who leaked the info, the lawyers or the FBI?

"First, have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it. What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?” ~ Charles Krauthammer."Hey, Charles, which "Trumpite" has said "Sure it happened"? What's left of your credibility when you fall for the faux collusion narrative and make such casually phony accusations?

As a non-Trumpite NeverNeverTrumper, I dislike the foolishness of Trump Jr. et al., but I detest the dishonesty of the NeverTrumpers.

"If someone I didn't know reached out and said, 'I have them,' I would have immediately called the [Trump campaign] committee and said this person says he has them... I wouldn't want to touch them. But I would very much want them out there in the public.

Reminds me of something from a Donald Westlake/Dortmunder novel.

Someone hand the police chief a bundle of cash as a bribe and the first thing he does is calls someone at HQ to report it. "He didn't get where he was by accepting bribes from people he didn't know."

Hillary had to have annual meetings on how to treat sensitive documents, beginning from the time she was elected to the senate and continuing through being SoS. Despite training and yearly reminders, she did whatever she wanted with secure documents.

DTj went to one meeting that showed questionable judgement (assuming he had all the information before it that we do now, otherwise it's just a poor choice in hindsight.)

The press, including NYT, WaPo et al are working a Watergate-style coup against the president. Obama or his AG directed the "burglars" to target Republicans at Trump Towers. Trump-gate. So far, Trump has not taken the bait, and has actively exposed their collusion.

Trump Jr. seriously underestimated the wolves in the domestic and foreign political arena. This is not the corporate world, which has its own brand of viciousness, but with far smaller stakes: billions vs trillions, market vs global domination.

By deleting email, does that imply that, essentially, the "Sent" folder has been eliminated/deleted/destroyed? How about the corresponding emails that reside on each recipients email inbox/saved folder?

Blogger MadisonMan said...And in fact -- if the Russians had called Hillary's fatally flawed Campaign and told her they had the Emails -- her campaign similarly would have been setting up a meeting.

Which reminds me, how was it even remotely plausible that Sally Yates was convinced that Mike Flynn was compromised because he hadn't been completely forthright in disclosing his conversation with the Russian ambassador? It had been open knowledge that the Russians had compromising information about the DNCs collusion to get the nomination for Clinton over Sanders, and yet no one in the Democratic Party thought that meant that Clinton should have withdrawn her candidacy because she could have been subject to blackmail by the Russians.

You might have to first define "NeverTrumpers." Does that mean those like George Will, who felt that Trump was so dangerous to the nation and so strategically destructive to the Republican Party that he had to vote for Hillary? NeverTrump seems like a fair label. And an entirely different debate from anything that I have ever taken part in.

Or does it mean the Republicans who never supported Trump in any primary, who worked and hoped and prayed for Trump to NOT get the nomination... but who in the end (like me) voted for Trump. In that case, "NeverTrump" seems flatly inaccurate, because "Never" didn't mean "never." I voted for Trump, as the least-worst option.

Assuming that somebody wants to badge me as "NeverTrump," what is my "dishonesty" in that regard?

I agree that the only sin that DJT Jr is guilty of here is bad judgement in personally attending this meeting. As people have pointed out many times, Donald Trump himself is not a politician, or at least certainly not a standard politician, which of course is a large part of why he was elected. And his son clearly isn't a politician or a professional campaign operative either. He's not Karl Rove or James Carville, he's just a guy who saw what he thought was a great opportunity to help his father's campaign and jumped at it without realizing all the dangers.

Interesting insight from :Jonathan Turley“The perils of nepotism have been captured in President Trump’s responses to his son and son-in-law eagerly attending that they believed was a Russian government lawyer bringing dirt on Hillary Clinton directly from the Russian government…”~ Turley

" .....proves this is a canard only meant to mislead idiots and provide succor for traitors."

No clearer sign of treason than to collude with Russians to affect a democratic election and then becoming a useful idiot for Putin as an AMERICAN President, while not even mentioning the traitors and sychophants who support the Traitor In Chief.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

In the eyes of the establishment hypocrites in DC and the media, how "under" did an underling have to be in order to receive dirt on Hillary and be considered acceptable Trump campaign behavior?

If Don Jr. had sent his red-headed step-cousin-twice-removed to attend this meeting in his place, the media would be calling it not only proof that the Trump campaign "colluded" with the Russian govt, but worse (!), it was proof that they were trying to HIDE the fact that they were "colluding" with the Russian govt.

Scott Adams is right: the best reaction is to simply laugh at the hypocrisy and absurdity. Point out the crime and I'll take the story seriously.

Most compelling of all are cameos of the bit players: the staff members, lobbyists, newspeople, policy wonks in permanent agitation, seeking almost religious consolation in the "old-normal rituals" of a world gone by -- like the Congressional baseball game -- only to see them turned into a shootfest by a Bernie groupie.

Is there no balm in Gilead? None apparently.

Things used to reliably fail in Washington, Leibovitch recalls. "In 2013, I published a book called 'This Town,' an anthropological snapshot of the gilded, inbred carnival of early-21st-century Washington. It portrayed Washington as a permanent feudal village of bipartisan politicians, former officeholders, celebrity staff members, lobbyists, journalists, hangers-on and usual-suspects of all stripes.

"Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed believe Trump is making significant progress toward his goals, while 55% feel he is not.

And when asked whether Trump was doing a better or worse job than previous presidents, 50% of respondents said he was doing worse, while just 23% said he was doing better and 24% said he was performing at about the same level as previous presidents."

Can you tell me whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are bad people who should not have conspired with a foreign government to undermine the U.S. government? I was reliably told Democrats think they were unfairly railroaded.

The scenario as I see it now is that the Russians were trying to play them for fools. The reason to give emails to a campaign rather than to the NYT is so that the campaign feels more indebted to you, more in your corner, and ultimately, more vulnerable to blackmail. For all that to happen, they have to get them directly from you. Giving them to the NYT doesn't play as a favor.

Also, Hillary Clinton did act badly with her email, maybe even illegally. She lost the election for it and is not President. If the Trump administration is not prosecuting her (when he promised he would), that's a clear sign her actions were just immoral and not illegal. In either case, as a non-President with terrible future political prospects, she is not a relevant point of comparison.

Assuming that somebody wants to badge me as "NeverTrump," what is my "dishonesty" in that regard?

I see no “dishonesty” in the commentor’s denigrations of Trump, which are admittedly myriad in number. No, he seems to me to be honestly attacking Trump at every opportunity, even though the commentor has admitted he voted for Trump.

Just because the commentor voted one way but acts another way is no sign that he is suffering from “dishonesty.” There are other possible explanations. Perhaps the commentor wants impeachment and a trial so that Pence will be POTUS after Trump’s fall has occurred. Maybe his vote for Trump was really a vote for Pence, who he wishes would end up as POTUS after that rascal Trump is kicked out of office.

…Who in that room do you think is above lying about what transpired there? ... Oh, maybe you’re taking the word of the sketchy Russian lawyer. ...But we should take her word that nothing happened?...

Ok, let's try to think about what we are quoting. Assuming they are all lying, then what? The Russian government did pass information to the Trump campaign about Hillary's criminal activities... then what? Trump sat on it because he thought it would be too mean? He decided his lead was big enough and he didn't want to rub it in?

Why did this proof of Hillary's criminality, supplied by the Russians, never see the light of day?

Good for you. That's certainly healthier than being filled with rage all the time.

You know what else is funny? My husband and I are moderate, independent voters who didn't vote for Trump --or Hillary-- in Nov. But if the election were tomorrow we would both vote for Trump without hesitation, because we've grown to dislike his opposition much more than we dislike Trump. Isn't that a laugh?

Faustus commented at the diplomad blog that for her blog on South America, she is having a hard time finding articles. Donald Trump is sucking the attention of the news media with every negative being thrown at him. I am surprised he is doing as well as he is in polls. I wonder if this latest story was the one that jumped the shark? The press is also missing all the stuff the Trump admin is getting done.

Until they feel they have to be truthful, like just before an election and sometimes not even then, the polls are in the business of feeding the MSM narrative. Polling is a VERY competitive business; the face-time and attributions by the MSM are worth millions in free advertising. Such a situation is ripe for corruption. The polls are shit.

I suspect that Trump was probably ahead of Hillary almost from the beginning.

The media lies to make leftist all warm and fuzzy, and right on cue, the leftist believe the phony polls used to push a phony narrative. When will the leftist here get tired of being lied to? By the people they supposedly trust.